11. Kylie #2
He was furious about it. Small and red and screaming, already offended by the temperature and the lights and the whole rude business of having been born.
Black hair, damp against a skull the size of an orange.
His eyes screwed shut for now, but I already knew what color they’d open into weeks later, and I was right.
Giovanni’s blue. His father’s impossible, heartbreaking blue, looking out of my son’s face, a message I hadn’t asked to receive.
“Does he have a name?” Sylvie asked, laying him on my chest, all warmth and weight and outrage.
“Nico.” I had chosen it months before and told no one, held it close and quiet the way I held everything that year. “His name is Nico.”
He stopped crying when I said it. Probably a coincidence. I chose to believe it wasn’t. I held my son against my heartbeat for the first time and understood, finally and completely, what people meant when they said love could hurt to breathe around.
***
The scare came a couple of months later.
A stranger photographing the theater. Just a man with a camera, ordinary-looking, unremarkable, except that he was taking pictures of the building in a way that felt focused. Deliberate. Like he knew exactly what he was documenting and why.
I noticed him from the site office window while Nico napped in his stroller beside my drafting table. Noticed the way he lingered on certain angles. The way he glanced toward the window where I was standing, then quickly away.
The fear that flooded through me was ice-cold. Instantaneous. Every muscle in my body went rigid with it.
They found me.
I grabbed Nico, still sleeping, thank God, his small body warm against my chest, and called Declan from the burner phone I’d never stopped carrying.
“Someone’s watching the theater. Taking pictures. Male, white, mid-thirties, wearing-”
“Description’s enough.” Declan’s voice was calm. Professional. Calm, the way a man sounds when he’s handled worse. “Stay inside. Don’t let anyone see you. I’ll have people there within the hour.”
The hour was the longest of my life.
I sat in the windowless bathroom of the site office with Nico in my arms and the door locked and every worst-case scenario playing through my mind on a loop.
Giovanni’s people. Or his enemies. Or someone who wants to use Nico as leverage, as a bargaining chip, as a way to hurt the father who doesn’t even know he exists-
Declan called back at 4:47 p.m.
“He’s a scout. Works for a development company out of Atlanta. They’ve been sniffing around historic properties in the district for months - the Marlowe’s on their list of possible acquisitions.”
The relief was so intense I nearly threw up.
“You’re sure?”
“We ran him down to his kindergarten report cards. He’s nobody, Kylie. Just a guy doing his job.”
But that night, after I’d put Nico down in his crib and stood watching him sleep, I remembered what that hour of terror had felt like. Remembered how quickly everything could change, how fragile this life I’d built really was.
Hiding was work.
And it would be work forever.
Rosa found me within a month of Nico’s birth.
I don’t know how, she never explained, and I never asked. Some combination of resources and intuition and the iron will of a woman who had decided that her grandson (because that’s what he was, whether Giovanni knew it or not) wouldn’t be raised without family.
She didn’t tell anyone. She just started sending care packages. Sicilian olive oil and handmade pasta and tiny outfits from boutiques in Rome, all addressed to “my daughter” at a P.O. box I’d set up under an assumed name.
And once, just once, a note:
He’s still looking. He’ll never stop. But he won’t hear anything from me.
Take care of my Nico.
. R
The magazine article came out in October.
A small regional publication, the kind that covered architecture and historic preservation for an audience of maybe ten thousand readers, most of them professionals in the field.
They’d reached out through the theater’s newly established website, asked if they could do a feature on the Marlowe’s restoration.
I said yes because saying no would have looked suspicious.
Because the project needed publicity if we were going to secure funding for the final phases.
Because I’d spent a year building a new identity, a new life, a new version of myself, and that version was an architect who restored beautiful broken things and had nothing to hide.
The photographer spent a day on site. Caught me on the scaffolding, laughing at something Marcus had said. Got me reviewing blueprints with the crew. Snapped one candid shot of me pushing Nico’s stroller across the lobby while pointing out a detail in the restored ceiling.
Page four of the finished article. The stroller just in frame.
I saw it and thought nothing of it. Thought: good publicity. Thought: the funders will be happy.
I didn’t think about who else might see it.
***
It was a Tuesday when he found me.
Late afternoon, the Georgia heat thick enough to swim through. I’d been inside all day, working through punch lists for the final phase of restoration, and I stepped out of the theater’s side entrance to feel the sun on my face and remember that the world existed outside these walls.
Across the square, beside a car too black and too German for this zip code, stood a man built like a cathedral.
He was watching me.
Not moving. Not approaching. Just standing there with his hands at his sides and his face unreadable and a rolled-up magazine clutched in his fingers like it was evidence.
My heart stopped. Started again. Stopped.
Giovanni.
He looked different. A year had changed him in ways I couldn’t immediately name, something in the way he held himself, the set of his shoulders, the stillness that had replaced his usual coiled energy.
He looked tired. Older. Like someone who had spent twelve months learning what it meant to lose something that couldn’t be replaced.
I could have run. Should have run. The side entrance was right behind me; I could have ducked back inside, called Declan, disappeared again before he could cross the square.
But my feet wouldn’t move.
And some part of me, the part that had been running for a year, that was tired of running, that wanted to finally stand still and face what was behind me, that part said enough.
He crossed the square. Slowly. Like he was approaching something that might spook.
“Hello, Mrs. Ferraro.”
His voice was rough. Hoarse. Like he’d been holding it in for too long.
I lifted my chin.
“It’s Jordan now.”